The recent proliferation of the communication-enabled devices requires a large amount of data being transferred to and from these devices. When located inside of the building these data can be transferred over a communications network of the building. In most current applications, the communications-enabled consumer devices connect to the Internet via a local network, either wired, or wireless.
While the current approach of using one network in a home or small building suffices when there are only a handful of devices communicating with the Internet, such as computers, tablets, thermostats and other large appliances, this solution quickly becomes insufficient and ineffective with the proliferation of number of the devices trying to access the Internet from inside of a building. Large number of devices accessing one local area network (LAN) increases the burden on this network and its router to appropriately divide the network resources among all network nodes. A significant portion of time is spent in switching the communications from one device to another. This is especially prevalent in the wireless networks, where it is usually impossible to have multiple devices sending data at the same time and not interfering with one another.
In addition to this, the cost of adding a device to a local wireless or wired network is significant and can be an economical barrier to its long-term, large-scale, successful deployment. In addition to the component cost, there also is an energy cost associated with broadcasting relatively wide-band wireless signals, such as WiFi signals based on a variant of IEEE 802.11 specification. This additional energy cost adds over time to the overall cost of ownership of each device and the entire network.
There is a need for at least a two tiered-solution which allows a trade-off between the total ownership cost of the device and the amount of data it needs to exchange with remote servers on the Internet.
The invention disclosed here aims to provide a solution to this problem by allowing the devices to choose between at least two modes of communication. One network, typically WiFi, is a longer range network used for exchanging large amounts of data or frequent communication. The other network has a considerably reduced range, usually allowing communications within one room only and thus reducing the power needed and preserving battery life for the devices. A typical example of such network is a Personal Area Network or Peer to Peer Network, such as one based on IEEE 802.15.4 family of standards or on any of the variants of the Bluetooth specification, in particular Bluetooth Low Energy.
Another common trend in modern buildings is to make them intelligent so called smart homes or smart buildings are becoming more prevalent and allow users to control various aspects of the building via the local communication network (usually WiFi or IEEE 802.15.4 based). These include programmable thermostats, garage door openers, alarm systems, etc.
These new communication-enabled devices provide the owners the ability to control the respective aspects of the building when operating remotely and as such have proven very useful. They do, however, have a relatively limited capability on their own. Their true power can only be realized when coupled with an intelligent building management system that anticipates the needs of the building occupants and acts to satisfy these needs without the need of special interaction from the user.
Such system relies on sensors to detect presence of people or animals in the building by using various modes of occupancy detection. Most prevalent in use are the occupancy sensors that are very effective at detecting a presence of a person in a room. Their greatest shortcoming is the lack of the ability to identify the person in the room—they cannot usually tell one building occupant from another or whether the person detected should or should not be allowed in the part of the building the sensors are installed in.
It is therefore an aspect of the presented invention to facilitate the detection of the identity of the building or room occupant to enable more intelligent building control.
Another aspect of the presented invention is the combining of the communications hub with the occupancy identity detection to improve the operation of the automated intelligent building control.
Finally, one more aspect of the presented invention combines the communications hub and the occupancy identity detection into one physical device. This serves to greatly reduce cost of deployment of the system for the new intelligent buildings and makes the overall solution much more commercially viable.